turned my old phone into a dedicated music device

heyo there, how are ya? so, recently I've been getting more and more into dedicated devices, basically a single device to do a single task, unlike our phones who do most of the tasks. I was looking for a nice MP3 player, but I would always end up either looking at something expensive, or an iPod, which is expensive to me so, basically a no no. 

that's when I stumbled upon a random video, titled "how to turn your old phone into an MP3 player", that video got my attention instantly and I watched it, and man it SUCKED! basically the guy told you to just get and old phone, factory reset it and use it only for music streaming apps. basically use a phone like you do (if you don't work with it) but without a SIM card, which is a lame way to do it IMO. 

however, the idea had some potential in my eyes, so I decided to give it a little twist and turn it into the most dedicated music device I could without having to root, change its ROM or something like that.

first step is getting an older device you're not using anymore but still works. my old phone is perfect for this, it's a Xiaomi Redmi S2, it's volume button has been lost a while ago, but other than that it works perfectly. next (in my case) I recently bought a pair of bluetooth headphones, they're not top quality audiophile type shit, but they're good and work for me, so its fine, they're a Phillips TAH2209.

now back to the phone, I did a factory reset on it, connected it to the wifi and skipped every single login that the phone asked me to do, Google, Xiaomi and all that shit, this will be as account free as I can possibly do. I don't know if Samsung allows you to use it without and Samsung account, hope it does, but if it doesn't, sorry to all my fellow Samsung users, can't help you with that. 

after it finished setting up, I turn on airplane mode, it doesn't have a SIM card anyways and bluetooth still works so, let there be airplane mode. now that we're here, we're gonna use Google Chrome, you can either use it or download another browser, I wanted to use this phone as an FOSS (free and open source) so, I just used it to download the F-Droid app (basically an Playstore for open source apps) and there is were I got the two main apps of this device. 

firstly is the music player, which I use Retro Music, its a nice and simple player that has tag editors for albums and songs, pretty much everything you need for a simple music device. and now secondly is the browser, which I use to download missing album covers and stuff like that, I'm using Private Browser. I don't really know all its capabilities and things like that, but it managed to download an image in JPEG instead of fucking BIN so it's good enough for me. 

and now that the device part is done, we go to the final part, adding music to it. since mine is an Android device it's very simple, simply copy and paste the files from your PC to your device and done, anything that is misstaged you can fix with Retro Music. I like to listen to music in a specific way, most people listen one or two songs here and there from their favorite artists, I however, like to listen to the whole ass album when I really listen to music (not just having it as background noise), so I'll have lots of albums to listen to. a recent website I found is DABMusic, it let's you download Spotify albums, so if everything you want is already in Spotify, just search the album on the site and there ya go, free download nice and quick. after that just transfer to your device and there ya have it, a makeshift MP3 with something you (hopefully) had hanging around in your house all this time. 

that's pretty much it for this post, I don't really even know why I did this post, but it's better than leaving my profile completely lacking of blogposts... 

see ya later (I guess).